Facebook voters have overwhelmingly rejected the company’s proposed data and privacy rule changes, but it may not matter. Voter turnout, as expected, was light years away from making the vote binding on the social network.

It was the biggest vote in Facebook’s history, with a solid 88 percent majority voting to keep Facebook’s policies unchanged, including the right to vote on future site governance issues.

But the Menlo Park company had said that if one-third of active Facebook members didn’t vote, it would only consider the results as non-binding.

Seriously, did anyone realistically expect 300 million – almost equal to the population of the United States – of Facebook’s 1 billion monthly active members to vote? And the turnout might indicate the true level of interest the vast majority of Facebook members had in the outcome.

Still, consumer groups like SumOfUs.org were putting out press releases even before the final tally calling the vote a “sham.”

“Facebook’s users have made extremely clear that they do not want Mark Zuckerberg to implement these extreme and undemocratic changes,” executive director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. “This is the latest move on Facebook’s part to steamroll users and make its platform less and less friendly to the privacy and usability interests of consumers, all in the name of profit. Facebook will have the legal right to ignore this vote, but it does so at its own peril. Facebook users are not going to put up with this nonsense forever.”

At issue were proposals that included letting Facebook share personal data about it users with affiliates, including the company’s mobile photo sharing app Instagram. The proposed changes also would do away with future membership votes on these issues.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Facebook should still heed the majority vote, even if the turnout was small.

Rotenberg said “88 percent of those who voted made clear their opposition to Facebook’s proposed changes. The vote was also the largest in Facebook’s history. The company should do the right thing and withdraw the proposal.”

He pointed to past history to show Facebook might do that. In 2009, he said Facebook “backed off a change in the Terms of Service after 150,000 users formed a group “FB Users Against the New TOS. In 2007, FB backed off Beacon when 50,000 users signed a petition.”